Going after some more of the best? of the best? of the best?……… in the financial Meltdown!
Financial crisis panel demands documents from Moody’s
Tag: U.S. economy
Oct 07 2008
A Thing of Beauty in a Barbarous Time
Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. – Ovid
With the economy imploding, and the wars, and crimes, and torture, and impotent political posturing — even as the pockets of the people are picked on a daily basis — there is a time, there must be a time for beauty, for a time apart the madness. We must remember what our humanity is, and why we even bother with the onus of civilization, with its exploitation and its barbarism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his famous essay, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” provocatively asked whether it wasn’t such condolences that bound us ever tighter to the chains of oppression:
Sep 30 2008
Boom and Bust, from a Notable Economist
While many of us find ourselves swallowed up by the panic stimulated by 24-hour news cable services and the dying daily press, when we consider the current credit crunch and threats of doomsday, it is important to get some perspective on what is really happening.
History provides us that perspective. The following description of the famous economic panic that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble that surrounded railway expansion in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century presents an illustrative example.
The economist writing here looked back at this famous economic collapse and drew some serious conclusions. The parallels between then and now are striking, even if “then” was over 150 years ago (emphases added):
Sep 29 2008
Eating Shit
And that’s a pleasant way to describe the bailout in the works by the corrupt politicians of the United States, these narcissistic, craven sellouts, who couldn’t bring themselves to stop their own country from invading another and killing 100,000s and displacing millions more, who couldn’t stop their military interrogators and gestapo-like spies from torturing thousands. These moral zeros are about to send something just under a trillion dollars to the scions of finance capital. These latter have lived high off the hog, raking in millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, off a pyramid credit scheme, leaving us — the suckers — to pay up for a generation or more when their con finally went spectacularly bust, unraveling into a wilderness of economic “instruments” and “derivatives” so convoluted and intertwined that no one could ever untangle it.
Jan 18 2008
WashPost: Wall Street Steals Billions from Shareholders
OK, so the Washington Post article today doesn’t stay “steal.” The headline reads Dire Year on Wall Street Yields Gigantic Bonuses. And how big were these bonuses? Reportedly larger than the GNP of of Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Bulgaria, oar more precisely, $39 billion dollars in year-end bonuses for the top five Wall Street firms. Meanwhile, shareholders in three of these five firms lost $80 billion dollars.
Now I know that economics is supposed to be the “dismal science,” but who knew how dismal? The shareholders of these companies may want to pause and consider the math. The money out of shareholder pockets, much of which comes from institutional investments by union funds, IRA mutual funds, state retirement agencies, etc., goes directly into the pockets of a handful of the super-rich. Meanwhile these same firms plan to ax “at least 4,900 jobs as losses mount from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market.”
Ah, this is capitalism.